War Memorial
by Blue Buick R
Summary: With their entire planet lost to them they only have memory and each other. A TFP story.


Title: War Memorial

Rating: G

Verse: Transformers Prime

Summary: With their entire planet lost to them they only have memory and each other.

Notes: I have no idea where this came from. I usually prefer my Decepticons a little harder edged. Therefore, be warned and prepare for the sap! Well as sappy as a couple of Decepticons can get anyway. This fits with this month's crimson_optics challenge "costs of war".

Soundwave considered himself a relatively even tempered mech. He did not have the intense, eldritch will of Megatron, or the fiery mood shifts of Starscream. He did not yell, or shriek or call out to the enemy, but he did hate. Soundwave's hate was cold. It coiled around his spark and drove him on to find some way to ease the numbing ache.

He hated the Autobots. They destroyed their shared home, not unable but unwilling to accept that the Decepticons were the future of Cybertron. They fought and scratched and tore the heart out of their world because they could not accept change and now their entire race was diminished because of their visionless obstinacy.

He did not doubt that they would defeat the Autobots, sweep away the decay and move on to build a new Cybertron in their own image. They lost much but earth would not be their tomb, but a stepping stone to a glorious empire. Until that time the past would haunt them, none more than Soundwave himself who carried within him the ghosts of Cybertron and was called to conjure them in secret times of weakness.

Times like now, sitting back to back in the pitch black of Starscream's quarters; where they touched the pulse of their sparks and circulating fluids beat almost imperceptibly against one another in the ringing silence. Their bodies, aliens on this planet, were so familiar that their beleaguered sensor nets stretched and strove to make contact with something recognizable…soothed, if only for a fleeting moment.

It was an essential respite. Earth irritated. A cacophony of particulate matter, shifting organics and dense atmosphere chafed systems and caused for a distressing number of false readings. They all anticipated their times in space with what was surely a private if unbecoming giddiness. Orbiting the planet they could vent the ship, billions of nauseating molecules sucked into the vacuum of space, easing the ache in everyone's processor for a time.

"Vos, if you will," Starscream's voice pierced the dark, the back of his head tilting to rest gently on Soundwave's own.

The response was almost instantaneous, the file at the ready as it was Starscream's most common request. Soundwave started softly, finding a slow increase in volume helped ease one into the illusion. The room filled with the sounds of flyers roaring overhead, the unintelligible murmur of voices on the streets, language indistinct but clearly Cybertronian, and the echo and reverberation of it all off of buildings constructed of crystals and alloys never imagined on earth until their arrival. He hears Starscream sigh and throws in a few subvoc transmissions to complete the fantasy. A snapshot of a time and place. An artifact of home.

Starscream begins to hum the tune a moment before it breaks into Soundwave's recording. A barely perceptible street performance perhaps or an attempt at ambience outside of a shop, it is impossible to tell. Whatever the case the bot or place is long reduced to scrap, the name of the song most likely lost as well.

When the recording ends he waits; if Starscream wanted a longer runtime he would have asked for Soundwave to loop the clip before they began. They sit leaning against each other in silence for a time, the echoes of Vos hanging about them in the gloom.

Finally Starscream stirred against him. "Well?" he asked. "Part two of that wretched epic poem you've insisted upon for the last two weeks?"

"I love Cybertron," Soundwave played instead, Megatron's voice a piercing blade between them.

Starscream tensed and turned to look over his shoulder at him despite their inability to see. "You can't be serious? You have the damn thing straight from source, what purpose can it serve you to have me recite it!"

Soundwave was indeed serious. Copies and recordings were all well and good, but they could not convey the essence of the words. Something was lost in process, something which compelled Soundwave for all that he had gathered to seek Starscream out and trade memories for speech…for Soundwave had no voice of his own.

"I love Cybertron," he played again.

Starscream settled back against him and sighed. "Very well, but don't think I don't realize you're trying to keep me in my place with this!" He cleared his vocalize. "Ahem…I love Cybertron. And it is because I love Cybertron that we must do what we are about to do. I do not know what will happen, but I do know that if we do nothing we will not be able to bear our future. If we continue on our path we will serve Cybertron as we are and the Primes will thank us. They will thank us and trust us and let us serve them for the rest of our lives, and we will never reach our true potential. I am the ember and you are the fuel for the only flame hot enough to light a future for our people…"

End


End file.
